Oh, I do so hope, dear readers, that you don’t feel I’ve been neglecting you? I do try so very hard to give the impression that I’m a grounded sort of a fellow, with a proper appreciation of the follies of our age – but it’s difficult you see, when I’m in such a whirl. I’m just back today from São Paulo, where the deliciously modest and unassuming Tracey Emin had a little vernissage at White Cube. I’d gone there from Hong Kong where I attended the opening last Thursday evening of Takashi Murakami’s new show at the Gagosian Gallery – lovely bright paintings of flowers and skulls that would make good wallpaper.

Before that, I was at another Gagosian on Madison Avenue in Manhattan for the launch of 30 new works by Bob Dylan, no less. It was a bit awkward, because I’d just been in Honkers for the Elad Lassry opening at White Cube, but obviously I couldn’t just sit there and wait. Oh, and before that I was in Rome, again at a Gagosian opening – this one for Rachel Feinstein’s neorealist architectural photographs. Such beauty! Such fun!

I’d popped there from Berlin, where’d I’d touched down for the Jannis Kounellis launch at BlainSouthern (awfully droll), and prior to that I’d also been in New York – yet again at the Gagosian – this time for an Ed Ruscha show wittily entitled “Stock Market Technique Number One”. I’d been hanging out in New York for a while, having pitched up at Antony Gormley’s opening at the Sean Kelly Gallery – well, one has to fly the flag, no? The day before that was one of Richard Prince’s “Four Saturdays”, also at Gagosian. While we’re on Gagosian, I must tell you how adorable their bijoux art showroom on the rue de Ponthieu is. I’d flown into Paris for Rudolf Stingel’s reception and stuck around for Anselm Keifer’s out on the Avenue de l’Europe. And don’t you just adore William Eggleston’s Ektachrome photographs of otiose Americana? I know I do – which is why I was in Los Angeles for the opening reception . . .

Not that I want to give you the impression that all I’ve been doing these past couple of months is gadding about the world attending exhibition openings. Oh no, I’ve also been doing some pretty serious attending here in England: trolling up and down Cork Street, making forays to Oxford and even benighted Liverpool in order to enjoy a glass of shampoo, a daub and some chitchat . . . At least this is what someone might conclude were I to expire at this moment, and they were to go through the six-inch-high stack of pasteboard on my desk.

The truth is I can’t remember the last time I went to an art opening – but that doesn’t stop these Frisbee-sized come-ons zinging through my letterbox. And not just invitations but also large and glossy catalogues, the unit price for which is probably well into double figures. Who, I often ponder as I scoop another highend print-job off the mat, seriously imagines that I will attend a Tracey Emin opening in São Paulo, let alone buy one of her hyperbolically overpriced bits of self-indulgent appliqué?

The answer, of course, is nobody at all: I’ve simply chipped up a bit over the years, written a few pieces about art for the newspapers, and so this great slew of stuff continues to slide into my numb fingers.

From time to time I think of calling up all these galleries and getting my name removed from their mailing list but, surprise, surprise, I never quite get it together. If only it were as simple as putting a sign saying “No junk art mail” on my front door.

Because that’s all this stuff is: junk mail sent out as a marketing exercise by purveyors of investment opportunities to the tasteless rich. The reason it’s scattered so widely is that it helps to conjure up “an art crowd”, and it’s within this seemingly freewheeling and bohemian milieu that the serious dealers cruise about, their expensively tailored dorsal fins cleaving the choppy waters of sociability as they zero-in for the killer sale.

Your average thick, tasteless Richie feels pretty exposed in the minimalist fish tank of an upscale gallery – but fill it with full-time wankers, poseurs and MAAWs (model, actress, artists – whatever), and they start to relax; after all, they’re not simply in it to stock up their portfolios – oh no. They want to be acknowledged as collectors, people with discrimination surfing on the zeitgeist. And so on they go, torching the planet and punching holes in the ozone layer as they jet off to the next biennale or bean feast: the art crowd, surely one of the maddest, and the most swinishly Gaderene that there is.

The “spatialisation of culture under the pressure of organised capitalism” is how the veteran critical theorist Fredric Jameson described the Westin Bonaventure hotel in downtown Los Angeles. This behemoth of a hostelry comprises a curious agglomeration of four giant squeezy bottles coated with mirrored glass grouped around a six-storey high atrium, up the sides of which shoot glass lifts. The Westin – which has a stand-still part in the epochal video-game series Grand Theft Auto – was, with its colour-coded zones and its restaurant-cluttered levels, an early spatialiser of late capitalism but, three decades on from Jameson’s appraisal of it, Zizzi, a chain of some 120-plus, vaguely Italian restaurants, is surfing the zeitgeist when it comes to such figurations.

This is what I thought as I clop-slopped in from the rain to an empty shopping mall. Up above, a thousand little dag-tails of fairy lights dangled from a bridge of white-painted girders, atop which hunkered an office block, lit up and void – a ghost ship sailing through the urban night. It was a scene that demanded zombies; instead I found Zizzi. In turn, dramatic logic dictated that Zizzi should be deserted: a pure cultural space through which the crumpled menu cards blew like tumbleweeds, but instead the glassy hull projecting into the mall’s atrium was loaded with folk eating, drinking and talking 9.857857 recurring to the dozen.

The waiter – who resembled a stevedore – dumped me at a table by the glassy bulwark. At the next table, three flushed men in their thirties were getting performative over their second bottle of wine as they ate crispy bread strips served in a furl of greased-paper pseudo-newsprint stuffed inside a miniature bucket. I could’ve sworn one of them said – loosening the knot of his puce tie – “Yeah, I’m poisoning him with Tipp-Ex!”

I cast about me at the pillars papered with a pattern of leafless silver birches, at the dangling 1960s-style lampshades that hung in bollock couplets, at the zinc-topped counter piled with wooden platters. I took it all in and sighed: I was home, where I belonged, with my Volk: the great, lumpy British bourgeoisie, who spend all day industriously servicing one another and all evening being serviced in turn.

As to food, let one menu description act as a synecdoche: “Agro dolce – one half mushrooms, thyme, mascarpone and mozzarella all drizzled with truffle oil. The other half speck ham, pumpkin and mascarpone with a sprinkling of crumbled amaretti biscuit. It really shouldn’t work but it does.” Basically, Zizzi is a high-end pizza joint with spicy pretensions. I ordered a risotto and a green salad, which were brought by the stevedore at a decent clip and were fine. I was fine, too, if that’s taken to be an acronym for Fucked-up, Insecure, Neurotic and Emotional. The men at the next table were talking about moving offices; the Tipp-Ex poisoning victim would have to be run through the shredder before they finally departed.

The Zizzi chain proclaims the usual charitable inclinations on its menu – in this case, it’s something to do with the Prince’s Trust. It had never occurred to me before why Charlie Windsor should’ve chosen this name for his institutionalised noblesse oblige but, when you think about it, by ceaselessly bringing before his putative subjects the words “prince” and “trust”, the subliminal message “Trust the Prince” is being implanted in all of us. Zizzi’s involvement with the trust seemed to have some bearing on its work with young graduate artists, whose work is displayed in the restaurants. In the case of this particular outlet, the work was by one Amy Murray, who’d done a series of illustrations that were riveted up in the corridor that led to the toilets. This sequence “attempts to capture elements of the Orient Express’s history while also creating intimate snapshots of its passengers at the peak of its popularity during the 1920s and 1930s”. The elements in question are, of course, “exoticism, intrigue and romance”.

I was a bit confused by all this: was it Murray’s illustrations alone that were meant to evoke the Orient Express or were the toilet stalls and the corridor intentional components of this fantastical mise en scène? I’ve never travelled on the Orient Express but I wager that even among all that exoticism, intrigue and romance, there’s still the occasional, pee-soaked bit of toilet paper flotched on the floor.

Anyway, there I was, urinating inside an evocation of a historic trans-European train, inside an Italian-themed restaurant, inside a British shopping mall … Fredric Jameson would, I felt certain, heartily approve.

The opening night of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées on 29 May 1913 has gone down in the aesthetic annals as one of the most exciting art riots of all time: the premier example of an aesthetically challenged mob baying for the blood of the innovators. As Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes dancers circled the stage in wild khorovods, to the accompaniment of the atonal “The Augurs of Spring”, they trembled, shook, shivered and stamped.

According to Alex Ross in The Rest Is Noise, his history of 20th-century music: “Howls of discontent went up from the boxes, where the wealthiest onlookers sat. Immediately, the aesthetes in the balconies and the standing room howled back. There were overtones of class warfare in the proceedings. The combative composer Florent Schmitt was heard to yell either ‘Shut up, bitches of the seizieme!’ or ‘Down with the whores of the seizieme!’ – a provocation of the grandes dames of the 16th arrondissement.”

All well and good but it hardly compares with serious civil disturbance, not when you learn that, by the end of the first week, The Rite of Spring’s entire run was booked solid. Stravinsky’s and Diaghilev’s shock opera had transmogrified into the contemporary version of Les Misérables. Rather more impressive were ructions outside La Scala a couple of years ago when the Italian government announced a 37% cut in cultural funding – these featured smoke bombs, riot police and Daniel Barenboim. What’s not to like? The opening of the La Scala season has often been the focus for a bit of agg’ – however, it’s seldom got anything to do with what’s going on inside but rather represents a sort of distinctively Italian gestural elaboration on the idea of opera.

The Astor Place riot of 1849 took place outside the now demolished Astor Opera House in New York and certainly qualifies as an example of a crowd losing its head: at the end of the night of 10 May, 25 had been killed and hundreds injured. The proximate cause was the rivalry between two celebrated Shakespearean actors – Edwin Forrest and William Macready – but its real genesis was that whereas Forrest was a proud “nativist” American, Macready was a ghastly Englishman. Those who consider matters of cultural dispute to be the preserve of limp-wristed time wasters should study the Forrest-Macready bout, which has more in common with the battle between Bill “The Butcher” Cutting and Amsterdam Vallon in Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York than, say, a tussle between Daniel Day Lewis and Leonardo DiCaprio over who should have the fanciest trailer.

Belgian independence arguably owes its very fact to an opera – or to a single aria, “Amour sacré de la patrie”, sung at a performance of La Muette de Portici in honour of the Belgians’ Dutch overlord, William I. Ah, the 1830s! When even Belgium was an exciting place and a fine tenor voice could provoke a revolution. Now, the screaming death chants of the most frenzied shock rockers provoke entire stadia of narcotised face-metal-wearers to . . . buy merchandise.

But opera riots provoked by nationalism scarcely count – nothing could be more infra dig than the 1919 Times Square demonstrations- turned-nasty against a production of Wagner’s Die Meistersinger, which was staged despite the mayoral ban on German opera productions then in place. Servicemen and civilians battled the NYPD’s finest and the whole fracas was reported in the Los Angeles Times under the teasing headline “Crossfire of bricks”.

After all, if you want to riot against a Wagner opera, at least go for Parsifal or The Ring Cycle. I go to the opera quite a lot, almost always equipped with the makings of a Molotov cocktail in the hope that Bryn Terfel will spark it off and the scores of suits slumbering on corporate freebies will get torched but somehow it’s always a bit of a damp squib.

The one recent production that looked promising – from the riot point of view – was The Death of Klinghoffer by John Adams, performed for the first time in the UK at the English National Opera in February. Adams’s opera, which deals with the hijacking of the Achille Lauro cruise ship by the Palestine Liberation Front in 1985, was accused of antisemitism after its first performances in 1991 and sidelined from the repertoire of the major companies. There was a lone protester outside the Coliseum but, inside, the audience sat silently through the show before applauding like the crowd of dutiful conformists that we were – how mad is that?

I’ve written before about those hideous, collective earworms – the nonce-phrases that clutter up our mouths then fall unbidden from our lips – and I make no apology for writing about them again; if you like – and if it makes it any more tolerable – think of this as a sort of nonce column, quite inadvertently repeated, with no more awareness being exhibited on my part as I type, than you have when you utter the words “to be honest”.

Yes, “to be honest”, it is without doubt the meme de nos jours – and as such, must represent a cul-de-sac in cultural evolution on a par with loon trousers or fondue parties. And everyone is saying it – oh, yes they are; you cannot turn on a radio or a television, get on a bus or a train, roll over into the sweet morning afflatus of your beloved, or walk your dog in the local park without hearing it. “To be honest” squawks forth from politicians and broadcasters, mutters sullenly from the woman and the man in the street, murmurs enticingly in your frowsty ear, calls to you across the muddy pockmarks and smudged white lines of the football pitch: to be honest, to be honest, to be honest, to be honest!

And what does it mean? Clearly, it has nothing to do with the truth; indeed, it is almost always appended to statements of either incontrovertible fact, or opinions of such an anodyne form that only Descartes’ malicious demon would dream of fabricating them. In our fair land, on any given day, you can hear your fellow citizens say things of the form: “To be honest, I had a pork pie for lunch,” or, “To be honest, I think Michael Heseltine’s a little pompous,” or, “To be honest, I never really liked Take That’s music.” (I introduced these statements as hypotheticals, but, to be honest, they’re all ones I’ve heard in the past 24 hours.)

Back in the days when the prime minister wore loons and his chin was permanently glazed with melted emmental, the reflex of fidelity was far simpler. “I think Ted Heath’s dishy,” people would say, and then after a suitable pause, “honest”. Or, to ring the changes on this, they might prefix their remark with the adverbial form: “Honestly, I don’t know what he’s doing sailing his yacht while the country’s going to the dogs.” The single word forms were both less jarring – and the opinions they bracketed were often a little more contentious. But nowadays, there seems to be nothing at all that cannot be dulled down by the addition of the hateful tic.

In the past I’ve advanced the view that these banalerisms seep up from the water table of the collective unconscious as telling evidence of the true state of things – in this respect they are, formally at least, entirely honest. In a society riven by bad faith – corrupt politicians, bent coppers, finagling hacks, kiddie-fiddling philanthropists, peccancy, in short, of every conceivable form – the quite blameless ordinary citizen nonetheless feels an inner compulsion continuously to profess her super-glued adhesion to the truth. But if things go on in this way I predict that you’ll find yourself in automated checkout queues grown exponentially longer due to the swearing-in ceremonies shoppers feel they must undergo; Bible raised in one hand they will intone, “I swear by Almighty God to remove all unexpected items from the bagging area.”

We erroneously believe we can save ourselves from being crushed by our own lack of faith in the most ordinary speech acts, and that there’s a personal nonce-phrase saviour – I refer, of course, to “I’m good”. In the past when you asked people how they were they might reply, “I’m quite well, thank you,” or even give you a thumbnail sketch of their health. But now there’s only the wet-blanket coverall: “I’m good.” Why does everyone say they’re “good”? It is because really we feel ourselves to be bad; bad because we lie about our pork-pie consumption and Michael Heseltine’s character; bad because we secretly sleep with a Gary Barlow blow-up doll; bad because we can no longer trust the evidence of our senses.

“I’m good” is a useless prophylactic, yet we must not flag – we must fight the “to be honests” on the beaches and in the bar rooms, in the classrooms and on the shop floor. I call upon you all to resist “to be honest” with all your might and main. How? It’s simple really: every time I hear someone say “To be honest, it’s been a rainy day,” I snap back: “No! Don’t be honest, lie about it – say it’s been a sunny day, spice things up a little!” To begin with they look at me suspiciously, but then a comprehension dawns on them and, to be honest, it’s a lovely sight.

Numbers of giraffes (Girrafa camelopardalis) in the African wild have more or less halved over the past decade, while the numbers of Giraffes (Restaurant pseudoglobalis) in the urban areas of Britain have more than doubled. I wonder if there may be some axiom at work here and that the inverse correlation is a fixed law. It would follow that anyone could start any old chain of crap restaurants, calling them – for example – Platypus; and so long as the namesake species was rapidly exterminated, success would be guaranteed. I realise this is a troubling business plan – but we live in troubling times.

I first became aware of Giraffe, the restaurant, in the early 2000s. But I don’t recall chowing down in one until 2008, when, tucked up in some lofty nook of the newly opened Heathrow Terminal 5, we indulged our hideous picky-eater children in buttock-soft burgers and stiff little fries, knowing full well that they’d refuse the free airline food waiting for them beyond the departure gate. It could’ve been the pre-flight tension or it could’ve been the terminal itself, but the only memory I have of that meal are the giraffe-shaped swizzle sticks the youngest insisted on clutching in his sweaty palms all the way to New York.

Four years on, and with 43 Giraffes now wavering across our stony-hearted Serengeti, all the way from Aberdeen to Portsmouth, the time seemed right to give it another go. All critics should beware of prejudice: the irritating fungal complaint that makes the most painterly surface appear . . . flaky. This being noted, surely a man can be forgiven for approaching a chain restaurant in a crappy mood – especially one that announces on its website that “It’s about exploring the wonderful foods from around the globe and opening our ears to music from around the world. Giraffes are so tall they see a different view of the world.” Curiously, the two locations the Giraffe people pick as their diners’ imaginative loci are: “anywhere from Sydney to Israel – somewhere sunny and full of smiles”.

Hmm – when I was last there, Sydney was a pretty tough town, and as for Israel, don’t get me started. Still, I wasn’t eating the Giraffe website. I and my now 11-year-old were being shown to a grim little circular table hard beside a big concrete pillar, while all around us roiled an international migrant workforce serving food to tourists. I could see there were lots of better tables that were vacant, so I snagged a servitor and complained. She plonked us back down on vinyl poufs in the reception area, cleared one of these better tables and then reseated us.

Was I mollified? Was I fuck. I scanned the menu: chicken potstickers, oregano halloumi skewers, falafel “deluxe” burger – blah, blah, blah . . . world, world, world. The waitress reappeared and took our drinks order. When she came back with apple juice for the young master and the ten-millionth sparkling mineral water of my effervescent life, she took our food order. Mine was simple: grilled salmon, mashed potato, a green salad. I couldn’t have the cherry tomato, fire-roasted corn and jalapeño salsa for reasons of gastric rather than psychic intolerance. As for the boy, he gave his burger order complete with a series of negative stipulations: no tomato, no mayonnaise and no lettuce – just bun, cheese, meat. I’m used to this bollocks, so paid it no mind until the patty appeared and he lifted its top lid and began to moan plaintively because there was something healthy in there.

Next, I did the bad thing. Was it because of the swizzle sticks – or because I am congenitally ill-humoured, or perhaps I simply wanted to challenge the fundamental taboos that surround eating in our benighted culture? I don’t know – and I don’t care. I picked up the offending burger and squeezed it in my fist until the hated mayonnaise squirted from between my clenched knuckles and spattered across the tabletop; then I dropped the macerated lump back on his plate, rose and went to the bathroom to wash. When I came back, expecting uproar, I found nothing but smiley calm: the waitress had cleared everything up and told me she was bringing a new burger without the offending gloop. Chastened, I ate my salmon, mash and salad – hardly world food but exactly the sort of thing I eat at home, and just as tasty.

Worse was to come, because they didn’t even charge me for my intemperance – and how goddam smiley is that? By the time we left I was beginning to think that this really was a family oriented establishment, so perfectly did they cater to adult children.

The mot juste is oophagy, meaning that strange form of in utero nourishment whereby embryos feed on eggs produced by the ovary while still in the mother’s uterus. There is speculation among ichthyologists – and sociologists – that oophagy may be preparatory for a predatory lifestyle, but in organisations such as the BBC it seems to serve no useful or adaptive function at all.

Ever since the Jimmy Savile paedophile story broke, we’ve witnessed one act of oophagy after another, as, within the capacious womb of New Broadcasting House, director general eats director of news, and director of news eats Newsnight editor. The only developed embryos to get out of there alive have been the original reporter on the Newsnight story, Liz MacKean, and her equally upstanding producer, Meirion Jones. For the BBC listeners and viewers, the oophagy has been more or less 24/7, as each bulletin begins: “This is the BBC news at X, the director general of the BBC, George Entwistle, has said . . .” I only hope that by the time you read this, it will have all died down a bit.

But what all that threshing about at the BBC has been obscuring from view is the more disturbing gyre of the societal whirlpool surrounding Savile’s abuse. Possibly there was conspiracy at the BBC to cover up Savile’s activities; it is not inconceivable that other media organisations passively or actively colluded with this, although, as regular readers will know – and please forgive the grotesque punning – I always favour cock-up as a heuristic over conspiracy. It seems to me that the question of how it is that the serial abuser Savile was able to hide in the over-lit view of the television studio for over four decades cannot be answered within any such binary formulations. As a species we’re addicted to the facile discrimination involved in saying that some phenomenon is either “this” or “that” – how much more uncomfortable that it may well be “the other”.

Savile was such a phenomenon: the seventh child of a Leeds bookmaker’s clerk, he was conscripted into the mines during the Second World War as a Bevin Boy. Making his career in entertainment, as a dance hall manager and wrestler, then as a disc jockey and television presenter, Savile occupied a pivotal position within the British class dynamic: as a deracinated petitbourgeois, his obvious affinities were with Tory leaders such as Ted Heath, Margaret Thatcher (seemingly a friend) and John Major. Like these politicians, Savile’s shtick was to personify a transitional state: between poverty and wealth, between stasis and change, between tradition and innovation. As such, his existence typified a socio-economic order – and related culture – that tends towards punctuated equilibrium. In his cut-out-and-keep Jackie magazine togs, he had the air of having been designed by committee, which in a way he was: a mass committee, the members of which numbered in the millions, and included both complacent leaders and the complaisantly led.

Key to Savile’s role was charity. “And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.” (1 Corinthians 13:13.) I don’t know if Savile was much of a Bible-reader, but he had Paul’s first epistle down pat and was able to violate the faith and hope of scores of young people through his philanthropic endeavours. Now, you may say that simply because a psychopath (and clearly, Savile was one) cynically deploys charitable activity to cover up his crimes, it doesn’t invalidate the principle of charity itself – but I say: it does.

Savile’s cynicism differed in degree from most people’s charitable motivation, but not in kind. Charity has come to play the same role at the mass level that Savile did at an individual one: it acts as a safety valve to shame the less well-off and otherwise deprived into muting protest. Violated by the social order, the poor cannot rise up and revolt, because having allowed Jim – or Oxfam/Shelter/the NSPCC – to fix it for them, their distress no longer has credibility.

The rich, as we know, love charity. They’re always having a ball – most often a charitable one. By institutionalising charity, state-funded bodies such as the BBC collude in socio-economic inequality – and by hearkening to their fundraising calls, we, the crowd, are equally collusive. Will anything change as a result of Savile’s unmasking? I doubt it – after all, the thousands of newly self-identifying victims of abuse that are now coming forward are having to be counselled and supported by . . . charities. But the BBC, once it’s dealt with the red face accompanying that oophagy, should seriously think about removing its red nose as well.